Versioning settings in OneDrive for Business, Groups and team sites in SharePoint Online
All SharePoint and OneDrive libraries will be set to retain a minimum of one hundred major versions. Existing libraries that have versioning enabled but are set to retain fewer than one hundred major versions will be updated to retain the new minimum. Libraries already set to retain one hundred or more major versions will not be affected, including those with the default setting of five hundred. With these changes, the Document Library Settings page will no longer support the ability to disable versioning or configure it to retain fewer than one hundred versions.

Again, there are reports of customers pushing back on Microsoft’s changes, and Microsoft have advised that organisations will be able to avoid this change on “Office 365 Tenants”, if they act before September 30th – “Otherwise, we will roll out the versioning setting update to your tenant in October 2018.”. This workaround involves a SharePoint Online Management Shell cmdlet, using version 16.0.7918.1200 or better.

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As we previously announced in MC138148, we will be providing an option to opt out of the upcoming document library versioning setting update. The library versioning update will prevent your users from disabling versioning, thus ensuring the availability of recoverable content. You can start opting out today using the SharePoint Online Management Shell cmdlet provided later in this post.

This message is associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID: 30544.

[How does this affect me?]
If you choose to opt out, your organization will not be able to take advantage of the upcoming version setting update. Document library’s versioning can be turned off by end users, and as a result, documents lose the protection of version recovery. Hence, we highly recommend you leave this setting on-by-default for the upcoming version setting update.

[What do I need to do to prepare for this change?]
If you would like to utilize the new file versioning settings, there’s nothing you need to do to prepare for this change.

If you would like to opt out of the versioning setting update, you can use the SharePoint Online Management Shell cmdlet, and you must do so by September 30, 2018. After September 30, we will begin rolling the new versioning setting out and will honor your organization’s existing settings.

However, when you do the math of the new “more generous plan” and compare that to the storage requirements for also storing a minimum of 100 versions of “everything” on your SPO, you realize that your org may, in fact, need to increase their storage allotment and cost.

They state 20x more, but that’s the ratio formula to determine the bonus storage based on total user seats, not 20 times the overall storage (which would be huge.)

To some of us, this feels like a slightly sneaky way to sell more storage.

Is there a value to having versioning? Heck yes. And some might argue that 100 versions minimum is not enough. But for smaller orgs with budgets, we look at this the same way we look at everything – by asking this question:

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